Artist Susan Daboll was born in South Weymouth, Massachusetts, and grew up in Niantic, Connecticut. While studying printmaking and photography at Syracuse University(BFA), one of her photographs was chosen for the brochure cover of an exhibition, solidifying her commitment to photography. After graduating, she moved to New York City where she worked in the commercial photographic field, including the research department of Magnum photos. Even while she had access to the work of photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, she realised that her aspirations were more toward fine art. This led to attending the graduate program in photography between New York University and the International Center of Photography(MA). Hired by NYU directly after graduating, she taught photography at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.
Running her own printing studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Daboll began experimenting with mural-size images and techniques. In the early ‘90’s, she earned acclaim for large-scale photographs of the female form that investigated sexuality, mythology, and religion. These were featured on the front of a neo-classic building at the Snug Harbour Cultural Center in Staten Island, NY, and included in an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
A 1995 Yaddo artists’ residency resulted in a radical change of direction, and she began using color film to explore nature and the man-made landscape. Technique played a part in her first exhibition of photographs shot in nature, impressionistic images removed from reality. In 2007, she started crossing over into digital printing, and later digital photography, completing her first all-digital project, Sublime Indifference, photographing in the fields of Paros, Greece. At the same time that she was exploring digital, she started to paint, missing the tactility of a non-digital medium, and continues to do so.
Daboll has always embraced technical experimentation, and unexpected outcomes in her work. At the same time, she has had an underlying theme throughout, which has been to take something out of the shadows and make it beautiful. Whether it be an uncomfortable feeling, an ordinary object, or an unappealing space, her intervention gives us another way to look at it, sometimes mysterious, sometimes sublime, definitely transformative.
Daboll’s work has been exhibited in many exhibitions, both nationally and internationally.
Collections include: Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, AT&T, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Chicago Art Institute, Citibank, Monterey Museum of Art, CA, Portland Museum of Art, Maine, Pfizer, University of Colorado, Boulder, Denver, University of California, Los Angeles.
Daboll lives and works in Paros, Greece, and NYC.